Zen Haiku: Usability, General Topics & A Bit of Poetry by Chad Lundgren

Useful Photoshop Shortcuts

So there are articles on Photoshop shortcuts, but they tend to list all 600+ shortcuts and overwhelm all but the most hardcore keyboard fanatics.

So here is what I find useful working on web designs and digital photographs. The only Photoshop knowledge you need: what a layer is and what a selection is. I'm leaving off all the generic ones like cut and paste.

Generally what I do is try a bunch of keyboard shortcuts out and see which ones I actually use enough to remember. I remember some of the individual letter ones too depending on what I'm doing. These are the keyboard shortcuts that "stuck."

1. Control-Alt-~. (you do not have to hold the Shift key down to get to it!). This selects the brightest half of the image. Great for toning down highlights a bit, or bringing out a little detail in the shadows if you Invert your selection.
2. Control-Shift-I. Select Inverse. Makes the selection go the other way.
3. Control-D. Deselect. Turns selection off.
4. Control-M. Curves. This command lets you change brightness carefully if you bend it a little, or do a poor man's psychedelia if you get wacky and make the curve all hilly. I call it dropping Photoshop.
5. h - hand tool. For dragging around when you're zoomed in
6. z - zoom tool, aka the magnifying glass. For zooming in and out.
7. m - marquee. Start a new selection. A selection is a marquee.
8. f - full screen mode. Hit it multiple times to switch to different views, then back to normal.
9. Tab - turn off the palettes - both this and "f" are great for working on big layouts or background images.
10. Control-T for Transform. More useful for layouts than photographs.
11. Control click on a layer to make a selection matching it. Then switching to another layer to use that selection, usually.
12. Spacebar. This is one of the few shortcuts where you cannot use the functionality without using the keyboard. Simply put, when drawing a selection or box, while the spacebar is down, you are moving, not resizing the selection. Letting go of the spacebar returns you to the the normal resizing mode. Now that's useful.

This post occured to me because I've been working on pictures I took on a recent trip to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Not to mention the pictures of the Sandias with a cloud blanket on top of them. I plan to post some of these.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Wednesday, January 8, 2003 (Link)